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First, there is, in point of fact, a network of pedophiles on YouTube as demonstrated by the article. Your comment is twisting it into "Omg pedophiles everywhere!" hyperbole for what reason?

The seriousness of even a single case of pedophilia or child exploitation cannot be overstated. Not only is it ethical and moral to take it very seriously, but it's also the logical action because children are our future and if they are healthy and happy then the human race is healthy and happy.

There is no fixing the problem, but we can mitigate it. The first step would be, apparently, to educate the public because comments like yours still exist which is deeply concerning. The second step is up for discussion of course, but perhaps it would be useful to ban children under the age of N from appearing in videos for more than T amount of time or perhaps ban altogether.

Can you elucidate what you find deeply concerning in the parent's comment?

I believe there is fixing, or strongly addressing, this harm: raise the standard of living, provide education and safe communication networks to children for identifying and reporting abuse (and importantly: feeling safe to do so), provide quality mental healthcare for those abused. Abuse often begets abuse: physical, verbal, and sexual.

I find your implication that "even a single case of pedophilia" is something to be damned morally and ethically disturbing (my interpretation being that you are implying a person who has the attraction, not a person who has acted on it). I believe that our incredible stigmatization of people who have pedophilic urges prevents them from getting the necessary counseling and help they need to not harm children. I believe that with a proper support network, they wouldn't harm children. Sadly, we seem to treat this criminally rather than medically.

Yet, I find it funny when people also say, in the same breath "omg governments using children as scapegoat for censorship".

Which is it? If you think you can have a 100% success rate you are horribly, stupidly mistaken. You WILL get innocents caught in the crossfire, you WILL see videos removed that are okay, and people WILL cry censorship.

People are demanding a flawless system, that never makes mistakes, that has 100% accuracy to be developed and released in the next week, and yet, we need a "free and open internet" otherwise Reddit gets angry and puts up hundreds of "net neutrality" posts.

Oh, what's that, Article 13 wants upload filters? BOO!! Yet they may catch this type of content.

Nobody likes that idea because it'd "ruin" the internet.

Which is it. This problem can ONLY be fixed with upload filters, potential censorship and mistakes which will affect a number of legit videos.

That okay with you? People seem pretty mad at youtube for their content ID and DMCA, just check r/videos.

This would increase 10 fold with any further automated system designed to attempt to filter certain categories of content.

People will have channels deleted and potentially their Youtube 'careers' ended by a machine. But r/videos hates this.

Problems and solutions have a relationship that is many to many.

A problem may or may not have a solution or many solutions. And solutions have a relationship not just to the problem they solve but also the problem or problems they create.

This fundamental meta-problem is a problem to which there is no solution. This is why we argue. This is why we fight. This... is why we politick.

Yes because the children are the problem we should ban them from videos.

As the GP points out there is no real exploitation here. There is harassing and demeaning comments and a general toxic culture of objectification, but limiting the actions of children it of some desire to protect them from the nastiness in the real world does them no favors and denies them their self determination.

The feminist movement has been dealing with these same issues affecting adults for decades. They have found that this sort of "protection" doesn't work and makes the problem worse. Children should be taught and supported in dealing with this behavior. We should impower them to bring the asshole commenters to light, shamed and held responsible. There's no magic age when the harassment stops or becomes okay. The best we can do for our children is prepare them for life.

And of course most likely after 4/5 years you regret uploading cringy videos like this and just delete them

Article didn't demonstrate any network, it essentially only shouted "Omg pedophiles everywhere!" as you put it.

Your position seems to boil down to suggesting since the problem cannot be fixed perfectly, nobody should even try, and meanwhile those who do try are "hysterical". In other words, simultaneously defeatist and offensive.

If you feel so hopeless about your impact on the world around you, please keep such depressing ideas to yourself

What exactly is the problem though? No children are exploited or abused neither any demand is created for abuse or exploitation of children with any of this, etc. So what then? You don't like what some people might think and do in the privacy of their home? Keep in mind, there is no evidence that they actually think and do anything you don't like, someone just claims they do. There is, however, plenty of evidence of pushing for censorship, policing, control using emotional manipulation. Like every child porn smear campaign ever.

>No children are exploited or abused...

Can you verify this 100%? You're absolutely certain that there isn't a single video on YouTube of a child where a grown up might've instructed them to do something that seemed innocent but the adult found sexual? I understand what you're getting at with the rest of your comment, but to sit there and say that not a single child on YouTube has been exploited or abused is really, really reaching and deserves a cited source.

You're asking someone to prove a negative, which is pretty much impossible.

But it does seem fair in response to ask if you can prove, with the same 100% accuracy, that any one of children in the videos identified by the article are being exploited and/or abused?

>You're asking someone to prove a negative, which is pretty much impossible.

Fair, but why state it as fact if it's impossible to prove?

>But it does seem fair in response to ask if you can prove, with the same 100% accuracy, that any one of children in the videos identified in the article are being exploited and/or abused?

Also a fair point, and I can provide at least two articles that addressed YouTube removing content involving the exploitation of children in the past. Granted, these aren't "the videos identified by the article", but they're strong evidence that, contrary to OP's claim, children have been exploited on the platform.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/youtube...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/youtube-i...

What exactly is the harm behind beheading videos? It's not like anyone is being beheaded every time you watch it, right. Nobody pays attention to these videos ever, nobody has ever been radicalized by them. No 15 year old British schoolgirl has run away to Syria and found herself pregnant and stateless because of them ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47301623 )

You could take the common line where if someone is driven to a compulsion though self-temptation, all responsibility lies with them. But if you encourage that compulsion knowing full well what it leads to, are you blameless?

I posit that knowingly providing tooling that actively seeks out, recommends on behalf of and encourages the behaviour of voyeuristic individuals interested in children, in an absolutely concrete way the provider of the tool is in part responsible for any child abuse that may result. When you're talking about a planetary-scale recommender, the scale of the viewers is terrifying -- and even if a small fraction of those compulsions are acted upon, that's far, far too many.

edit: apparently this line of thinking is so repugnant to some that it doesn't even deserve a reply

Your position seems to boil down to suggesting since the problem cannot be fixed perfectly, nobody should even try, and meanwhile those who do try are "hysterical".

I read the position as: "The problem can be mitigated, but we shouldn't go so far as to actually try to police people's internal thoughts and feelings. There are some who are so overcome by emotions with this issue, that they would even advocate going that far."

There’s a big difference between someone getting turned on by motorcycles and a two-sided marketplace of sexualized videos of minors.

Is it really a two-sided marketplace? Most of that content could easily be just aggregated from random social media accounts.

The sexualization only happens in the context of the viewer mentally sexualizing the content. The vast majority of people who see these videos, without any further context, would simply assume those are just family videos.

In that context, it is quite a bit perverse to have some people constantly fantasize how certain content could be "abused" for sexual pleasure by other individuals and how to best go about to deny them that pleasure. When in reality human sexuality is just fucked generally [0] and people can derive sexual pleasure from the weirdest of things, like naked feet in high-heels.

Would you rather these people build secretive in-groups where they trade real hardcore material, supporting actual physical child abuse? Should we ban the depiction of animal violence in general because some people derive sexual pleasure from it?

I just see no practical solution to this that doesn't end up with a lot of quite arbitrary censoring rules, that would then need to be expanded. Case in point: Just do a Google image search on "children's underwear" and you will find plenty of similar stuff like in those videos.

Should that stuff also be all removed/deleted/censored? That's where the real slippery slope begins.

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201605/cru...

Facts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ahzv21/importan...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/24/pentagon-us-st...

I mean -- I could give you literally dozens of "facts" -- so your comment is a strawman. its not hysteria, and I am skeptical of anyone who denies abuse. As a victim of abuse, I really can't stand people who say such things.

I mean -- I could give you literally dozens of "facts"

Facts are good. We can corroborate facts. Non-facts can eventually be debunked.

its not hysteria, and I am skeptical of anyone who denies abuse. As a victim of abuse, I really can't stand people who say such things.

As a victim of abuse, I still think everyone should exercise their skepticism, and not just victims and the outraged. If you advocate for skepticism, then you should not object to fair skepticism being directed at you as well. There is a great power in strong emotions and outrage, and with great power, comes great responsibility. Transparency is paramount. The best way forward is to avoid hysteria, and to go forward rationally.

There are no objective solutions to this kind of "problem". What one person think its OK, might not be OK for other. What one person thing disturbing, might not be disturbing for other.

It will always be forever battle between the 2 sides. The side who can force/convince the other will become the "solution".

The only thing you can do is fight for the side you believe in, whatever that side.

> What to do about that? How to "fix" any of this?

Ideas:

A. Auto take-down videos featuring minors with unusual amounts of sexual comments

B. Auto ban accounts that are repeat offenders of (a)

C. Require all uploaders have a real paper trail so they can be held accountable for what they upload

Uhm, A and B don't really feel that well thought out.

The creator/uploader rarely has any influence over what people are commenting, yet you would punish them if they had repeat offenders commenting under their videos. A system that would be very easy to abuse to get peoples channels banned.

This whole system would also heavily depend on how you classify "sexual comments", working on the assumption that communities wouldn't adapt by using invented slang.

While C is just straight up anti-privacy without any direct advantages. I have no doubt Google/YouTube/law enforcement currently have the capabilities of tracking down anybody using these services without any paper trails, that's in no way part of the issue.

> yet you would punish them if they had repeat offenders commenting under their videos

You misunderstand. If the uploader keeps uploading videos of minors that garner mass sexual comments, the uploader gets banned.

Uploader uploads preteen girl deepthroating popsicle. Lots of pedophiles come along and express their pleasure in the comments with water squirting emoticons and such. Bam, video flagged and taken down. Uploader uploads preteen daughter doing handstands/nipslips. Pedophiles return to comments to express pleasure in their sick way. Uploader is now repeat offender and account is banned.

I don't see why this is a big problem. If it's a family video make it private.

ML can be used to train algo on the latest slang.

> I have no doubt Google/YouTube/law enforcement currently have the capabilities of tracking down anybody using these services without any paper trails, that's in no way part of the issue.

Really? Why aren't they doing it? How do they track down people uploading via VPNs and such? Tying account to bank makes it much more difficult to evade law enforcement.

> You misunderstand. If the uploader keeps uploading videos of minors that garner mass sexual comments, the uploader gets banned.

I understood you perfectly fine, that's why I said this approach is easy to exploit by simply spamming the videos of some uploader you don't like with "sexual comments".

The qualifier of "uploads videos of minors" does not work because there is no kind of ML/AI that could reliably recognition children and their ages, and whether what they are doing is "sexualized" or not.

For that, you would need human moderation, and that's not just impractical, it's simply impossible because during one second more than 1 hour of content is uploaded [0]. People are uploading content faster to YouTube than any reasonable human workforce could ever hope to review, without generating a steadily growing massive backlog.

[0] http://www.everysecond.io/youtube

> I understood you perfectly fine, that's why I said this approach is easy to exploit by simply spamming the videos of some uploader you don't like with "sexual comments".

You'd need to have dozens of puppet accounts. Obviously you could take into consideration whether all the sexual comments are coming from one person/ip address.